


good girl

by firstaudrina



Category: But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina - Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: But I'm a Cheerleader! AU, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, warnings in notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28864488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: “I'm not gay!” Roz keeps saying. “I get good grades! I’m class president! I go to church every Sunday! I sing in the choir!” And when all else fails, helpless, “I’m a cheerleader!”She forgets to sayI have a boyfrienduntil it’s too late, and maybe that’s part of the problem.ABut I'm A Cheerleader!AU.
Relationships: Agatha/Rosalind "Roz" Walker, Harvey Kinkle/Nicholas Scratch/Sabrina Spellman
Comments: 30
Kudos: 42





	good girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts).



> I’ve honestly wanted to write a _But I’m A Cheerleader!_ AU for like a decade, and I am thrilled the stars finally aligned thanks to one line in clytemnestras’ excellent fic, [_comes across all shy and coy_.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28712628/chapters/70396434)
> 
> Anyway, you’ll pry Roz/Agatha from my cold dead hands. 
> 
> Warning for those who have not seen the movie: it is set at a conversion center, so beware of all the -phobias, internalized or otherwise. While it isn’t as campy as the movie, it is still pretty light overall and — spoiler alert — ends happily.

Roz’s parents tell her she’s a lesbian at 3:23 on Tuesday, two months before the end of her junior year of high school. She remembers it down to the minute because the whole time they’re talking, backed by Sister Jackson from the conversion center and some of the dippier girls off the squad, Roz is staring at the numbers blinking on the cable box. She’s supposed to be leading a student government meeting right now, but her parents told her to skip it and come home early instead. It was important, apparently. 

“But,” Roz keeps saying. “I get good grades! I’m class president! I go to church every Sunday! I sing in the choir!” And when all else fails, helpless, “I’m a cheerleader!”

She forgets to say _I have a boyfriend_ until it’s too late, and maybe that’s part of the problem.

“Well,” her father says, exchanging uncomfortable glances with her mother, “Mr. Kinkle has brought some things to our attention, as well —”

Which is how Roz and Harvey end up sitting side by side on a lime green couch at the Adam & Lilith Center, hands clasped or more likely clutching, both of them trembling slightly and sending each other sideways looks of terrified hesitance.

Roz doesn’t know what Mr. Kinkle has on Harvey, but she knows when they kissed, pressed up tight in his bed or the cab of the truck, she could feel a tender shiver in him, the beat of his pulse, and sometimes the strain of him against her. And Roz pressed as close as she could, thinking —

_Lizzie. June. Mira. Padma_. Their strong solid thighs under flipping red skirts, the tensed muscles of their arms effortlessly hoisting her into the air, catching her when she dropped. The locker room smell of sweat and perfume, hair tossed over shoulders, the brush of them all so close and laughing. 

Mary Wardwell, the woman running the Center, is placid and pious and totally off, as though she’s one second away from bursting out of her skirt-suit like a side character in a John Waters movie. She sits Roz down in front of a semi-circle of kids in heavily gendered pink and blue uniforms, Roz — and Harvey, waiting his turn — stuck in oversized electric yellow t-shirts over street clothes, picked out as newbies. 

“The first step,” Ms. Wardwell says, “is admitting you have a problem.”

“Well, I don’t,” Roz says. “I don’t understand why I’m here, why we’re —” She looks at Harvey, but instead of righteous indignation there’s something guilty in his expression, the way he won’t quite meet her eyes. Whatever she doesn’t know is a drip of dread down her spine. She takes a breath, closes her eyes. “I’m not gay. I’m a Christian. I love Harvey. I —”

The evidence they’d had on Roz, such as it was, was insipid: she’s a vegetarian, she had copies of _The Well of Loneliness_ and _The Price of Salt_ in her room, a poster of Janelle Monáe above her bed. Anyone can care about the planet. Anyone can read any book, like any kind of music. It doesn’t mean anything. 

Ms. Wardwell almost seems to undulate as she adjusts her stance, pushes her glasses up. “Perhaps hearing from some of our other —"

_“Prisoners,”_ one of the girls quips, to half-hidden snorts.

_“Students,”_ Ms. Wardwell corrects forcefully, “will show you how easy it can be to take responsibility. They’ve been where you are, Ms. Walker, and they chose to walk the right path.”

She kicks off the line of introductions with a gesture. 

“Hi, I’m Nick, I like pain,” says a boy who looks very out of place in the bright blue uniform, though he’s muffled it with a black moto jacket. He winks at Harvey. “And I’m bisexual.”

Ms. Wardwell clears her throat. “What have we said about that, Mr. Scratch?”

Nick rolls his eyes. “Jeez. You suck a couple dicks and —”

Ms. Wardwell’s gaze hardens, and Nick sighs. 

“I’m a homosexual,” he finishes. 

Next is the redheaded girl who made the quip, her hair braided milkmaid style over her head and clashing horribly with her hot pink blouse. “Hi, I’m Dorcas, and I’m a homosexual,” she purrs. 

Beside her, the leonine girl with the bleach blonde buzzcut acknowledges, “Prudence. Homosexual,” and Roz presses her legs together for a moment before she realizes that she probably shouldn’t, that everyone can see her here on display in the center of the room. Prudence lifts one straight black eyebrow, smirking. 

“Agatha,” drawls the last girl, her limbs so loose she looks like she’s sprawling even sitting up, eyes flint under a heavy sweep of shadow. Her lipstick is black and her tongue so pink beside it. She looks at Roz and smiles, lazy. “I like girls. A lot.”

The boys go by in a blur: Luke, a blonde, and two bookend jocks, Billy and Carl. “Now don’t you see, Ms. Walker?” Ms. Wardwell says. “They’re ready to begin their journey towards rehabilitation. I know you’re a smart girl. Do you want to be left behind?”

Her syrup-sweet condescension ignites Roz’s temper. She can’t stand it, the absurdity — the _injustice_ — cramming all of them in this stupid house even if they don’t deserve to be here. Even if they do. She’s missing the end of the school year for this. She won’t take her finals with everyone else, won’t cheer at games, will miss the spring formal, had to give up her student government spot. All because she likes tofu and the wrong kind of books. 

“I’m _not_ a lesbian,” she says, heated. “Everyone thinks I am, but I’m not. I don’t understand how this happened, everything has been going so well — Harvey and I are so happy —”

Ms. Wardwell interrupts, her smug voice curling delicately into Roz’s tirade. “Are you?” 

She knows what Roz doesn’t, and when Roz looks at Harvey, he swallows hard.

It’s his turn in the hot seat. 

Roz perches uncomfortably on the very edge of the sofa opposite, squeezed in next to Dorcas and heart pounding, while Harvey faces his worst nightmare: a room of people staring directly at him. 

There’s a glass coffee table between them that holds Roz and Harvey’s promised uniforms, folded neatly and wrapped in thick red ribbons like Christmas gifts. Between the pink and blue piles, Ms. Wardwell throws down a sheaf of papers that Roz immediately recognizes as Harvey’s sketches, though they’re ones she hasn’t seen before, not from her boy so shy to share. There’s one full page filled with small sketches, different angles of a man’s naked torso twisting, his hips and thighs; a couple of superheroes in skin-tight spandex. 

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Harvey says, face so red his head might explode. “Figure drawing is — everyone likes superheroes —”

Ms. Wardwell nudges the pages so they splay open further, and Roz gasps without meaning to at the sudden explicit shock of it. A drawing of a boy under a girl, arching, black straps heavy on the girl’s hips and a dildo between her thighs; another naked man, his mouth open, hand around his erection. “And what do you have to say to _that_ , Mr. Kinkle?”

Nick answers instead. “I think I’m in love,” he says, and the girls next to him snicker. 

There’s a ringing in Roz’s ears. 

Afterwards, they’re shown to their separate dorms, Prudence leading Roz around the house’s wraparound porch to a different entrance. The Center is a big Victorian house up a winding road so desolate it feels like floating in space. When Roz looks out past the lawn green as AstroTurf, there are only empty roads and fallow fields. 

“Admitting is the first step,” Prudence says, pointing at a blackboard hanging on the side of the house, where looping chalk script has listed out their names next to a row of five boxes. Everyone has the first step checked off, except for Roz. Even Harvey. “Every morning we have group therapy after breakfast, then lessons until lunch; reorientating exercises in the afternoon and family therapy on weekends. For those of you who have family.”

Her voice is arch and musical, almost mid-Atlantic. Roz is glad to see the uniform even looks stupid on someone as blindingly beautiful as Prudence, a girl evidently made for finer things than this. She turns on her heel outside the door, hand on the knob, and her dark red lips spread in a smile that feels like anything but. “Here’s where you’ll be spending the next two months,” she says, and opens it. 

The bedroom is an explosion of poison pink with one dark blot: Agatha on one of the five tightly made beds, hospital corners tucked in securely. She has black knee socks on with pointy ankle books, her pink skirt slipping up her thighs, her nails black, her hair in braids; so incongruous where she is, a fly on a slice of cake. 

“Lights out at ten,” Prudence says. “Any inappropriate behavior punishable by expulsion.”

“Inappropriate,” Roz repeats, the first word she thinks she’s said since she saw Harvey’s drawings. Her mouth is dry thinking of sleeping in a bedroom with Prudence and Agatha and Dorcas with their mean smiles and lace peeking out from their shirts, skirts rolled up so they ride high above the knee. “Inappropriate like —”

“Fucking,” Agatha finishes lazily, and smiles. “Try not to trip and fall onto anyone’s tongue, cheerleader.” Her tongue, so pink, curls behind her teeth. Roz wants to run out of the house, down the road, and out as far as she can go.

But Harvey is here. And her parents made it very clear how her time at the Center was going to go.

So Roz stays. 

She grabs Harvey’s sleeve at dinner and pulls him away from everyone else. He doesn’t want to meet her eyes. “Find me after lights-out,” she insists. “By those big rosebushes in the back. Okay? We have to — We have to talk.”

He nods, miserably, and goes to sit with the jocks. 

When she turns, Agatha is watching her, pink straw against those painted black lips. Unreadable, but reading Roz like a book, somehow. She smirks and wiggles her fingers in a wave; Roz bristles and sits alone. 

Roz pads soft-footed across the grass that night and finds Harvey waiting, drags him into a kiss before either of them can say a word. It’s a forceful kiss; she presses into him until she’s on her toes, his hands automatic on her hips. He answers each kiss as quick as he can, but Roz is going too fast for him, her hands on the buttons of his stupid blue pajamas. She’s still in that wretched yellow shirt, so she pulls it over her head and lets it hit the ground. She pushes Harvey’s shirt off, but this is too much for him; he wraps his pajama top around her naked shoulders. He shivers so she can be shielded. 

“Roz,” he says, “Rosalind, wait, we’re not — this isn’t how we were going to —”

They’ve been waiting to have sex, and now Roz isn’t really sure why. They haven’t been dating that long, but she’s slept with boys in less time. She’s known Harvey her entire life, but it’s only been a couple of months since his brother’s death and his breakup with Sabrina; sweet months of hopeful handholding and respectful boundaries. Why would Roz scoop up her best friend’s ex-boyfriend if she didn’t really want him? 

She’d tried other boys, a few at camp; she’d slept with some of them, her back in the grass outside the cabins. It was fine, but it wasn’t anything special, and she knew if there was one boy who could be special, it would be Harvey. It would obviously be Harvey.

“You don’t have to prove anything,” Harvey is saying, but Roz has gotten tangled up somewhere inside her head. “Look, this is my fault, if my dad hadn’t found those —” His voice fades in and out as she thinks, _Lizzie, June, Mira, Padma_. The flare of their skirts twirling into her head any time she put her mouth on Harvey. “I’m — I know it’s really messed up, there must be something really wrong with me — I meant to throw them out, I swear —”

Roz puts her hands over his, holding them against her chest. “Harv. Do you — do you like boys, really?”

He stutters. “I must, right?” he says after a moment. “If I want a girl to do, uh. That. To me.”

It’s news to Roz that Harvey wants a girl to do that to him. “No.” She pushes their joined hands against his chest like some kind of lie detector, wanting to feel the thump of his heart. “I don’t mean that. That’s totally okay. Do you think about boys?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Harvey says nervously. Roz’s insides sink. “Doesn’t everyone look at guys, like — in the locker room or whatever? Isn’t it normal to wonder what it would be like?”

“What do you mean?” 

Harvey is pink all down his neck, even though that’s supposed to be Roz’s color. She never did like how she looked in it. “You know,” he says uneasily, and can’t say anything else, but he doesn’t have to. 

June’s hand firm on Roz’s thigh pushing her up into a stunt. Falling back into Lizzie, who always laughed, her ponytail in Roz’s face smelling like springtime. Sabrina tangling their fingers together on the way to class and Roz not wanting to let go. 

Roz touching herself under that poster at night, telling herself fantasies don’t mean anything. People fantasize about all kinds of crazy things. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. 

“Oh, god,” she says, falling away from him. “I’m a lesbian.” 

The only person awake when Roz gets back is Agatha, who says, “Find what you were looking for out there?” Her hair’s an oil spill, pink nightgown slipping off her shoulder. “Is it easier to make yourself want him when you have something to prove?”

It’s close enough to what Harvey said that shame burns the back of Roz’s throat. “What do you know,” she says, wanting to snap but choked with tears, and buries herself in bed, pink quilt over her head. 

The next morning Roz gets her check mark. She comes down to breakfast in her new pink blouse and skirt, feeling hollow, and finds Sabrina standing in the middle of the room, suitcase at her feet. For a minute Roz thinks she’s dissociating, or having visions; she thinks she’s lost her mind. Then Ms. Wardwell announces, “Children, we have a new soldier in our ranks. I’d like to introduce you to —”

“I’m Sabrina Spellman!” Sabrina says brightly. “And I’m a homosexual!”

Roz snags Sabrina over bacon and eggs, bringing her and Harvey to the corner of the dining room and ignoring the appraising eyes of the other kids. Nick in particular keeps craning his neck to get a better look at Sabrina until Prudence flicks him in the throat and he wheezes; she slides her own considering look Sabrina’s way.

“’Brina, what are you doing!” Roz exclaims. “How are you here?”

There’s no way Sabrina’s family would send her here. They’re the gayest family Roz has ever met. If she hadn’t known Sabrina since forever, she wouldn’t think the Spellmans were real; that odd family at the top of the hill, the ones who always got the town of Greendale gossiping, and all of them heedless to a whispered word. Roz doesn’t go over to Sabrina’s house too often. It makes her ache.

Sabrina reaches for her hand, but Roz glances at Ms. Wardwell and moves out of the way. Instead, Sabrina links arms with Harvey. “What, did you think I was going to leave you guys in a place like this? No way.” She leans in, voice dropping. “Theo and Ambrose and I have a plan.” 

Harvey is smiling a little, the first time he has since they got here. “You do, huh?”

“Duh.” She bumps her shoulder into his, but Roz feels dizzy all of a sudden. She wishes she had a moment to sleep; maybe she could sleep through the next two months.

“’Brina,” she says. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not even —”

Sabrina’s big dark eyes sober. “Well,” she says. “I am, actually. Boys and girls.” Her chin lifts. “I’m just not interested in changing it.”

She can say that. The people in her house wouldn’t want her to change, either. 

Step two is rediscovering your gender identity, but Roz never felt like she lost hers. 

What it means is splitting them up, boys versus girls, and sending the boys outside with Ms. Wardwell’s deputy, this blonde surfer-dude inexplicably named Caliban; keeping the girls inside the way girls are always kept inside, away from the air. They do dishes and scrub the floors and learn how to sew. Roz wonders why she left her parents’ house for this, because it’s not like it’s anything new.

She’s getting a little salty. It’s hard not to.

It’s like she has a starring role in one of those dreams about walking into class naked before a big test; Roz is exposed in every possible way, even inside her own head, as though she’s made of glass. Every lie she told herself seems so laughable now. 

She wonders how she would have discovered it on her own. If this never happened.

“Buck up, buttercup,” comes the murmur in her ear, Agatha’s voice like smoke. She leans over Roz’s shoulder at the sink, slipping a pink-gloved hand into the soapy water to take a glass from Roz and rinse it. “You gonna lay down and die or do something about it?”

With a hard look, Roz says, “What are _you_ doing about it?”

“Getting by,” Agatha tells her. “Any which way I can.”

It pings something in Roz, and her brow smoothes, anger fading. Until —

“Though it might perk me up to watch you shake your pom-poms.” Agatha shimmies a little. “How about it?”

Roz flings a fingerful of soap bubbles at her and Agatha smirks, unperturbed and untouchable, removed from all of it, from everything. 

Outside, Caliban teaches the boys about chopping wood and fixing cars — things Harvey can already do without trouble — but they swoon when he shakes out his golden hair, and when he slides underneath the car, thighs splayed open, their heads tilt dreamily sideways, all down the line. 

Inside, Roz is learning to embrace her femininity, which means living out the naughtiest wicked dream of a slumber party — a male gaze extravaganza, except there are no men here. Prudence slicks Roz’s hair into careful finger waves, face close and intent, teeth sinking into her bottom lip with concentration; while she does that, Sabrina hooks Roz into a lacy purple confection, a bustier that snatches her breath, but not as much as the cool brush of Sabrina’s fingers does.

Dorcas is practically incandescent at getting to play dress up, loosing all that red hair and shedding their stiff clothes for Center-approved cocktail dresses and undergarments. She giggles while Agatha does her makeup and Agatha laughs too, chiding her and holding her face still to dab on candy pink lipstick. Roz really wonders at the decision to put them in lingerie and lock them in a room; the logic escapes her. But Ms. Wardwell looks on fondly in her own finery, and they don’t even pretend not to notice the luscious tumble of her hair, the low cut of her velvet robe.

It’s fun. It shouldn’t be fun, but it is, like how Roz insisted cheer was stupid until she got on the team. It helps that Sabrina is here, slipping her arms around Roz from behind for a quick hug before Ms. Wardwell tsks. Roz wonders where the line is, and if this is why it took her so long to find it before — the kind of things that are okay for girls to do, and how you don’t know you’re doing them wrong until somebody tells you.

“Your turn, cheerleader,” Agatha says. She has a bottle of bruise-purple nail polish in her hand. Roz never paints her nails, she can’t keep up with the chipping, but she lets Agatha take her hand and carefully move the brush from finger to finger. Her skin fizzes like New Year’s champagne until her whole arm is numb.

“One of the most majestic parts of heterosexual living,” Ms. Wardwell announces beatifically, Caliban by her side flexing casually in front of the gathered boys. “Is platonic friendship! Once you learn to treasure the bonds of intimacy in a non-sexual manner and create reliable connections, you’ll no longer seek to spoil your relationships with sinful, meaningless sex.”

“Are you sure,” Nick says. Sabrina snorts, and hides it behind a ladylike hand. “I don’t think that’s how that works.”

Nevertheless, they break off into pairs: Dorcas leaps into Prudence’s lap and must be reprimanded; Billy and Carl take refuge in each other; Luke sidles up to Caliban. Nick saunters over to Harvey, hip cocked, and Roz watches Harvey’s throat bob in a swallow. She gets up to go over to Sabrina, but she’s on the other side of the group, and when Ms. Wardwell claps her hands again, Roz is still stuck next to Agatha.

“Oh, looks like I’m the odd one out,” Sabrina says, unbothered. “I’ll just go join the boys —” And, disregarding the rules of the exercise entirely, plants herself between Nick and Harvey.

Ms. Wardwell eyes them. “That might be for the best,” she allows. 

She hands out flashcards that are supposed to teach them about the correct roles of men and women, something that Roz would have tried to _ban_ if it ever crossed her path at Baxter High. She shuffles through them, their nineteen-fifties fantasy normalcy: happy housewives and pretty dolls, blank-eyed mothers being kissed on the cheek by square-jawed men. All the women are white. 

Agatha snatches the cards and shuffles them like she’s about to deal poker, then says, “I used to read tarot, but Wardwell keeps my cards locked in her desk drawer now. Lest the Devil tempt me into lesbianism.” She wriggles her eyebrows. “Too late.”

They’re sitting on sawed-off logs in the garden, a spot for singalongs and late-night marshmallow roasting, if anything like that ever happened here. Agatha lays out three cards in a row, a simple spread, and then flips them one by one. “Oh, this is inauspicious,” she says. “Mommy Makes Pot Roast, upside down. You’re destined to overcook anything you ever make for a man. Date Night with Daddy, right-side up. Maybe your boyfriend has a shot after all. But worst of the worst —” A sharp sound made between tongue and teeth. “Happy Homemaker, that’s basically the Death card.”

That gets Roz, a surprised snort of laughter that almost hurts her throat it’s so hard-won. 

“Here, I’ll make it up to you,” Agatha adds. When Roz looks up, it’s just in time to catch Agatha tugging aside the open collar of his shirt to flash her nipple, so quick and matter of fact that it’s like it barely happened, her buttons securely fastened a second later.

Roz splutters and then laughs, tension released like a popped cork. “What is the _matter_ with you!” Roz exclaims, but she’s still laughing, and Agatha smirks. That’s about as close to a chuckle as she gets with anyone besides Dorcas or Prudence.

“Made you feel better, though,” she says. “Didn’t it?”

Step three is finding the root of your homosexuality: the moment it all went wrong and you were condemned to a life of sin, usually because of your parents, or because you watched the wrong movie and imprinted on the image of a woman in leather riding a motorcycle. Not that Roz would know anything about that. “There’s actually a lot of debate surrounding the idea of nature vs. nurture,” she begins, but Ms. Wardwell cuts her off swiftly.

They go around the circle. 

“I hate my father,” Prudence says dryly, studying her nails. “I think all men are beneath me.” 

“Some of us would like to be,” Nick quips, and Sabrina elbows him.

Ms. Wardwell doesn’t quite roll her eyes, but they migrate around her skull with uncontained contempt. “You’ve got the spirit, Mr. Scratch, but please save it for Step Five. Would you like to share?”

It isn’t really a question. 

“Domineering single mother,” Nick says promptly.

“All boys boarding school,” Luke volunteers.

Billy and Carl exchange a look, then say as one, “Varsity showers.”

“I was born in France,” Dorcas offers.

Bored, Agatha says, “Spanked by a nun as a child.”

“Oh, my aunts are witches,” Sabrina says mildly.

All those waiting eyes land on Roz and Harvey, who turn to each other with nervous habit. “Um, I don’t know,” Harvey says, eyes dark and troubled as he pulls his gaze away from her. “I always liked art. Um, I never really liked sports that much?”

“Mr. Kinkle, there have been many great artists who lived blamelessly heterosexual lives,” Ms. Wardwell murmurs in her haughty coo. “We’ve seen what —” Her red lips move, not a smile but a flutter. “Lurks in the depths of your mind. It seems to me that someone is afraid to disclose.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Sabrina says sharply. “I don’t think that’s any of your —"

But Harvey is flushing, speaking at the same time as her. “I’m not. I just don’t —”

“I don’t know my root either,” Roz interrupts, to save him, because that’s what they do for each other. She and Sabrina exchange a nod. “Maybe those long hours of bible study —”

“I fail to see how that would do anything but help,” Ms. Wardwell says with icy sweetness.

“Right.” Roz’s brain whirs, realizing as she scrambles that no, that was the root of the other thing; the root of hiding. It’s so startling and so obvious that she completely stops thinking for a minute, can’t even come up with a lie. 

Sabrina saves her. “Maybe it was all those sleepovers,” she says sagely, and to Ms. Wardwell, “We used to play boyfriend-girlfriend, and I always made Roz be the boyfriend.”

She winks. The best part is that it’s true, and Roz never let herself think twice about it either, two little girls playing house under a blanket fort. Exchanging quick, giggling kisses. 

“My goodness, I can’t believe you didn’t mention this earlier!” Ms. Wardwell claps her hands together. “Ms. Walker, this is a revelation! Your confusion about gender roles, your desire to gain the approval of a friend from such an immoral household —”

“No, it’s really not like that —” Roz tries. 

But Ms. Wardwell has already deemed this a success and mentally moved on, leaving Roz sitting there, thinking —

How sweet they were, those little girls. She doesn’t know how such a happy memory is supposed to be the source of everything that’s wrong with her.

Sabrina is planning something. Sabrina usually is.

Roz catches her in conversation with Billy and Carl after dinner, earnestly explaining something too quiet to hear. Across the room during their gender reorientation exercises, Sabrina catches Prudence’s eye and gives her a nod, their communication silent and understood. On Saturday before family therapy, Sabrina surreptitiously slips Dorcas a folded-up note of emerald green paper, which immediately finds its way into Dorcas’ bra. 

Roz can guess, and she’s proud of what Sabrina is trying to do, but she can’t help but feel left out of the resistance. Sabrina has never pulled her aside, hasn’t whispered in her ear. Does she think Roz doesn’t need to hear it, or is she afraid Roz won’t be on board? Can she tell that there’s a tiny part of Roz that wants to ignore what she’d realized by the rose bushes, because it would be easier; because her parents want her to; because she really does love Harvey. Does Roz have _hypocrite_ written on her forehead, or worse yet, _narc?_

But all of that falls out of her head as soon as her parents walk through the door. 

Pastor Walker and his good wife. Her father didn’t earn his congregation by chance; he greets everyone in the Center with warmth and friendliness, taking their hands in his and looking directly into their eyes. “God be with you,” he says, and means it. “I’ve been praying for you.” He means that, too.

Her mom brought food in wide foil pans made to be dished out and thrown away, richly spiced pork and rice with a tray of cinnamon rolls as a treat. Everyone pounces on the food (Sister Jackson isn’t really the best cook) and while they’re busy, Roz’s parents come face to face with her.

“Rosie,” her dad says gently, and here’s the thing —

She has told him fourteen thousand times that she doesn’t like being called Rosie. It went on so long that it became a running joke, a thing he did specifically to get on her nerves, to make her groan and go _dad!_ with irritation. She always took it in stride, just another annoying family thing, but now it feels a hell of a lot more significant.

“That’s not my name,” Roz says coldly, but when she’s prodded to sit between them on the couch, she does.

Everyone else’s family trickles in over the morning: Sabrina’s witchy aunties and cousin Ambrose, Harvey’s dad already complaining about missing a morning of work for this, Billy’s magazine-perfect mother and step-dad, and Carl’s harried single father. Last to arrive is a man in a sweeping black coat with slicked-down hair, his heavily pregnant wife by his side. And that’s it. That’s everyone.

Zelda Spellman insistently smokes until she loses patience with Roz’s mom asking her to stop and puts her cigarette out in one of the cinnamon rolls. “I fail to see the point of this,” she says. “Everyone’s gay, and if they aren’t, they should be.”

“Oh dear,” Ms. Wardwell says, frantically writing something down on her clipboard, her hand moving before her stunned gaze drops down. “Oh dear, much work to be done with Spellman…”

When attention turns to Harvey again, Mr. Kinkle dismisses him with, “Kid’s always been off.” He has his arms crossed over his chest belligerently, sunk down in his seat with legs planted so wide he’s taking over a full third of the couch. “Nothin’ I ever did — gave him the best since he was born, could’ve played any sport, had a brother to show him what to do —”

“I’ve been, um, thinking about that, actually,” Harvey says. “My root. Uh. I was thinking, maybe… Mom died when I was so little, and Tommy kind of stepped in to do mom stuff? He made me dinner and bought my clothes and took me to school. Maybe I, um. Got kind of confused about the roles of men and women?”

“Mr. Kinkle, you’ve been holding out on us,” says Ms. Wardwell, relieved as she scribbles away. “But on the topic of your particular perversity —”

“Am I to believe I was made to come out all this way, with my wife in the condition she is, to hear the psychological rambling of some repressed teenage boy?” This from the man with the precisely parted hair, introduced briefly as Mr. Blackwood. “Who cares about the cause of their perversion?” He gestures widely. “We’ve sunk a great deal of money into this endeavor. Prudence, I expect you to get more out of this program than some of these —” His lip curls. “Degenerates. As for you two, just try to keep up. You know what’s on the line. Now, we have an appointment.”

He doesn’t help his wife stand, though she struggles to rise from the low couch and keep her balance; he’s already out the door before she makes it to the foyer, her little heels clacking. 

Prudence looks like she’s tasting bile. It’s only then that Roz realizes Blackwood’s expansive hand gesture encompassed not only her, but Agatha and Dorcas, whose faces have more or less shuttered; Dorcas picks up another cinnamon roll and takes a big bite.

Roz walks her parents out to the porch when the session ends. Agatha is sitting on the grass, her knees pulled up to her chest, a small hunched shape in pink and black. 

“Honey, I know you’re angry at having to miss out on the end of your junior year, but this is for the best,” her father says, his hand heavy on her shoulder. “We know you’re a good girl. This is going to work, and you’ll become the woman I know you can be — a godly woman in a loving marriage, like your mother and me.” He squeezes. “But if it doesn’t…”

Roz’s pulse skips. “If it doesn’t?”

He turns to her mother, who tucks her hand into the crook of his arm. “Well, baby,” she says. “You have to know you would be on your own. You couldn’t come home.”

Roz stares at them. “What?”

“I can’t allow that kind of lifestyle under our roof, in our church,” her father says, like he has no choice; like his hands are tied. “How would that look, my own daughter?” He shakes his head. “If you choose to — to abandon yourself like that, Rosie, then you’re choosing to cut me and Mom out of your life.”

It takes a moment for Roz to find her voice, and find something to say with it. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I knew it.” Her mom leans in to kiss her cheek. “We’ll pray for you, baby.”

Roz drops onto the grass next to Agatha. “So. Are you all adopted?”

Agatha snorts. She’s shuffling the flashcards again, laying them out in Celtic cross in front of her. Flips one that shows a woman cradling a baby. “No,” she says. “Inmates. They couldn’t have kids for the longest time, so they started collecting them wherever they could. Father Blackwood’s home for troubled girls. I think he gets off on it. Acts like a saint for putting a roof over our heads. Like we owe him our lives.” 

Another card flipped. _First Date Bliss_ is written underneath a picture of a white boy and girl kissing over an ice cream soda. 

“He doesn’t seem like a very nice man.”

“What gave you that impression?” Agatha wonders wryly. “You get used to it.” She pauses. “Prudence is his, though. Not the wife’s. It’s worse for her. I’m scraping through for the benefits; she hasn’t given up on a home.”

“Benefits?”

“If we transform into good, god-fearing girls who respect Daddy, then we get full-paid college tuition and our own apartment.” Agatha sounds grim, and a moment later she sweeps all the cards into a jumble with one careless hand. “Whatever. Fuck him. I can keep a secret if it means I get my bills get paid.” 

Roz’s brow knits. “Should you have to?”

Agatha gets to her feet, gaze downcast and derisive. “You tell me, cheerleader. You ready to give it all up yet?”

Roz doesn’t have an answer to that.

Demystifying the opposite sex, step four, comes with a slideshow of the happy hetero romcom life they’re supposed to want, then a writing exercise about their dream partner. “Are you allowed to want your dream partner to have a dream partner?” Nick asks, and then isn’t allowed to sit with Sabrina and Harvey anymore. 

“Remember, children,” Ms. Wardwell intones, clicking from one slide to the next, from one demonically happy face to another. A little judicious editing and it could be a cult documentary. “Visualization is the first step. If you can see your future, you can _be_ your future.”

If Roz was going to build a boyfriend from scratch, she knows what would go into him: he would be sensitive, considerate, kind to people who needed it, funny, sweet, artistic. A boy soft enough to cry at the end of sad movies, who would read whatever feminist literature she dropped in his lap. If she had to special order a boy, she would fill out _Harvey Kinkle_ on the order form. Now, watching him smile as Sabrina leans over to critique his essay, she feels a love so big it fills her chest, but nothing that makes her heart beat faster. Harvey makes Roz feel steady and safe, but not —

Not.

She casts a look around to see how everyone else is doing. Prudence is on page three of a treatise written in tight, tiny block print, with what appears to be a lot of sub-categories. Dorcas stares at a blank page. Luke keeps trying to doodle flirtatiously in the margins of Nick’s paper as Nick pointedly inches his chair away. He writes something down, then folds the paper into an airplane that he sails neatly across the room to Sabrina and Harvey.

Agatha sketches out the hazy shape of a hand giving the middle finger, then gets to work filling out its long, pointed black manicure. 

If Roz liked girls, what kind of girl would she like?

Just the thought is enough to make her heart go panic-crazy. 

“Hey.” She snags Harvey’s sleeve while Sabrina folds a paper airplane to send back to Nick. “Can we talk?”

The good humor fades from Harvey’s face, and she thinks: yeah. That says it all. 

Roz sits at one end of the stoop and Harvey at the other, a long taffy-blue step between them that feels about a mile long. 

“I still like girls,” he says, in a quiet, hidden whisper. “I mean, I know what Ms. Wardwell says about bisexuality, but —” He turns to Roz with those downturned eyes that seem sad no matter what, even when he’s smiling. “I wasn’t lying, with you.”

“I know. I wasn’t, either.” She just wasn’t telling the truth, to him or to herself. With a single snatched inhale of hesitance, she pushes on. “It’s way worse here, right? Packed up in those rooms together without anything else to think about —”

Harvey catches on with a rush of relief. “It’s like a test you’re supposed to fail. I mean, Nick doesn’t make it easy, he’s always —” He falters. “Sorry. Is that weird?”

Roz picks herself up and shifts a little closer along the step. “Yes,” she says, and smiles. “Tell me what Nick always does.”

By the time they’re done talking, they’re hip to hip again and laughing. It feels better than it has since the day he asked her out and Roz said yes, because she had to say yes. When they’re called back in for dinner, Harvey hangs back a moment longer to say, “Hey. It was nice being your boyfriend.”

Roz smiles. “You were a good boyfriend to have,” she tells him. 

A tether holding Roz to the ground is gone, and she floats. 

_Nick always…_ Harvey had said, his face going progressively pinker, and gave her a litany of things she never in a million years would have noticed. Nick always wakes up with his hair in a tumble of wild curls. Nick always wears glasses to bed. Nick always has nightmares, and Harvey wants to reach across the space between their beds to lay a hand on his cheek, smooth that furrowed brow. 

Roz had grinned and teased him and pushed down the voice inside her that said _Agatha always_ —

Agatha always moans in the morning, this throaty unconscious sound she makes before her eyes open. Agatha always brushes her hair upside down, a sheet of glossy black that she tosses back up and smoothes down, binds into braids. Agatha always has her hands in everyone else’s makeup, stopping a girl at the door to drag her fingernail around her lip line so it’s perfect. Agatha always gets ready in her skirt and bra, undone and rumpled at the foot of the bed. Her long legs lay akimbo with knee socks slipping down and boots unlaced, freckles making a constellation from collarbone to sternum. 

Agatha bends her head over the sink at night, bringing cupped clear water to her lips and raising up with a glistening mouth, droplets sliding over her chin and down her throat until they disappear under the neckline of her nightgown. “Thirsty?” she teases, and reaches out just short of touching Roz, who huffs and busies herself with her hair, and pretends.

Roz always pretends.

Then there’s the aversion therapy.

They’ve all had to white-knuckle it through another girl touching herself in the silence of the dorms, though Roz personally thinks it would be polite to wait until the shower. Not that she’s one to talk, because she’s been too locked-tight to touch herself since the day her parents drove her here. But from Agatha’s bed there’s always that throaty morning sound, then a sharp buzzing and a flare of red light, a bitten-off whimper. 

Roz lays on her back with the quilt up to her chest and her arms rigid above it, straight down her sides. “What are you doing,” she says finally, through clenched teeth. 

“Aversion therapy,” Agatha says, breathy, and doesn’t even pretend to act surprised that Roz was listening. “You know —” A buzz, a moan. “You think about a girl, the way she — _oh_ — frowns when she’s angry, and — and how you want to pin her down and put your hand between her legs — and then you give yourself a little _shock_ , so you know how bad you are —”

Mary Wardwell is sick. They each have one of those little shockers, vibrator-shaped, in their bedside drawers, right on top of a copy of the bible. 

Roz can’t take it. She goes out to gulp fresh air and then slips into the foyer, leans against the doorway to Ms. Wardwell’s office and tries to catch her breath, but can’t. Her problem isn’t that she’s not getting enough oxygen. She gathers her silky pink nightgown skirt, brings it up and up until she can slip her hand into her panties. She’s already wet. She can feel her heartbeat there, against her fingers and inside her, and she finds a rhythm in time with it. _You think about a girl_ , Agatha murmured. _How you want to pin her down and put your hand between her legs_. Roz pictures Agatha’s black nails sliding against her and smothers a little cry, then hears it echo back at her.

Wait.

She stops, shivering, and lets her skirt fall. There’s another groan, deeper this time. She steps into the office, eyes adjusting to the dim light, and catches a flash of platinum hair through the glass of Ms. Wardwell’s desk. 

She hadn’t even realized Sabrina’s bed was empty, but it must have been, because she’s here with her hand in Harvey’s hair, baring his throat for a punishing kiss. The cry had been his, because he does it again and Sabrina hushes him, Harvey’s fingers reaching down to curl tightly in Nick’s unmistakable dark hair, his head between Harvey’s thighs. 

Roz gasps. “Guys!” she hisses, and they scramble apart, clothes pulled frantically into place. “You’re going to get in so much trouble if —”

“Told you!” 

That triumphant voice isn’t one of the four of them, so they all whirl around to see Luke leading Ms. Wardwell into the office. “I told you, Ms. Wardwell!” he crows again. “They’re perverts, look at them! They’re having an orgy!”

Ms. Wardwell holds up one hand and presses the other into her temple, eyes half-closed and false lashes awry. Roz doesn’t think she’s entirely awake, but as soon as she sees the guilty looks on their faces, Harvey beet-red and mussed, Nick’s swollen mouth, she becomes so sharply alert that they all feel a chill. 

“Oh, no, no, no,” Ms. Wardwell says, with her slow and dangerous _tsk_. “What do we have here?”

Roz is easily absolved of wrongdoing. Sabrina gets points for being caught with boys, and a demerit for engaging in tawdry behavior. Her punishment is to write an essay on the benefits of monogamous relationships. Harvey is sent to the doghouse, literally: a solitary shed with a suspiciously cheerful paint job. 

Nick, who had been the one on his knees, is out. 

He bids them his final farewell from the front yard, bag slung over his shoulder, finally looking like himself in cuffed jeans and a black button-down with his motorcycle jacket on. “Stay golden, Spellman,” he calls out, grinning. “Tell farm boy I can’t wait to finish the job!”

At the gate, he gives them one last wave before directing his middle finger Ms. Wardwell’s way. 

Roz tries not to feel envious, watching him go.

One night before lights-out, Roz steps into the daisy-printed bathroom to find the girls crowded around the mirror, fully dressed in civvies, a shock of reality after the last few technicolor weeks. Sabrina has her headband on, with a fitted red sweater and black cigarette pants, while Agatha, Dorcas, and Prudence are wearing matching minidresses in varying bruised shades, lace at the cuffs and collars in a look Roz could only call “fetish pilgrim.” 

“Guys!” she exclaims. “What are you doing?”

“Didn’t you get the memo?” Sabrina says. “I’m breaking us out for the night. Planned the whole thing with Ambrose.” 

“What about Ms. Wardwell? She just kicked Nick out, and Harvey —”

“Oh, fuck her,” Agatha says lazily, sauntering by. She hip-checks Roz. “Live a little, babydoll.” 

“We only have a couple of weeks left,” Roz urges, hand tight around her toothbrush. A couple of weeks and she can stick it out for her senior year, go to college and figure out the rest of her life however she likes. 

“No one’ll find out,” Sabrina promises, which is usually what she says right before someone finds out. 

“Oh, she can suit herself,” Prudence says carelessly. “I need to see people besides the four of you or I’m going to start clawing the walls.” 

They tiptoe out one by one, leaving Roz all alone in the pink room, a good girl until the bitter end.

She gets dressed so fast that she makes it to the car before the door has even shut behind them.

The car in question is actually a hearse with SPELLMAN MORTUARY printed on the side. Ambrose is driving. “Hello, ladies,” he says with easy charm. “Just us girls tonight?”

“That’s typically how we like it,” Prudence murmurs, leaning into the small window that keeps the cab separate from the back. “Depending on where we fall on the Kinsey scale.” 

Roz can see the shape of Ambrose’s smile in the rearview mirror. “And where do _you_ fall?”

“I like to be right in the middle,” Prudence drawls. “In most situations.”

Sabrina interrupts them to hoist herself over the barrier and rifle through the glove box, emerging with a neat stack of fake I.D.s. “I couldn’t get the boys to come, but I’m working on it,” she says, resolute, as she starts handing them out. “Well, except Luke. Luke can choke.”

She faces them, jostling slightly in the seatbelt-free back of the hearse. “I want you guys to know that the Center isn’t the only option,” she continues. “There’s a great big world out there, and you don’t have to squeeze yourself smaller to fit into it.”

Roz’s fingers curl and clench at her sides. She really should have stayed behind and gone to bed, slept through misbehavior like she’ll sleepwalk through her senior year, just get through it any way she —

Agatha’s fingers curl, cool and careful, over Roz’s fists. “I know you’re not scared,” she says, and meets Roz’s eyes, her own so sharp. “So stop pretending.” 

Everything comes out of Agatha’s mouth harshly, but Roz is starting to think that’s just how she sounds: fierce, and not to be fucked with. Still, it’s annoying. “You think you know everything,” Roz huffs. 

Agatha smirks. “Not everything. Just getting a good read on you, babe.”

The club is called Dorian’s, a name scribbled in artful neon script above a black-and-silver door that opens into a nicer club than any of them have any right to be in. Music thrums through the walls and people crowd the dance floor, collect in the corners: couples of all kinds kissing, friends laughing, just — people. 

The first person she recognizes is Theo, drinking a beer and chatting up a guy with green hair. Almost as soon as their eyes lock, Theo is in her arms, hugging her tight. “I hate all of your parents. Seriously, they suck. My dad is adopting you. I told him and he’s on board. He actually seemed willing to trade me for you, which is rude, and I think probably a joke. Am I babbling? I missed you.”

Roz grins and her eyes prickle, so she hides them in Theo’s shoulder. “I hope I don’t have to take your last name.”

“Hey, you should be so lucky,” he jokes, pulling back to look at her. “How bad? Scale of one to ten.”

But Roz shakes her head. “Scale of weird to weirder,” she corrects. 

Right then, Sabrina suddenly shrieks and streaks past them, launching herself up and into the arms of — Nick, Roz realizes with a spike of surprise. He laughs and spins her around, Sabrina’s legs wrapping around his waist, her arms locked around his neck. “I didn’t know you were going to be here!” 

“A little surprise Ambrose and I cooked up,” he says, fond, and lets his forehead rest against hers. Only Sabrina could go into a conversion center and come out of it six weeks later with two boyfriends. “How’s our boy?”

“Not great,” Sabrina sighs, hopping down carefully. “I’m working on it.”

“Okay.” That’s Theo, taking Roz by the wrist and pulling her towards the bar. “We’re getting a technically illegal beer, and you’re giving me the tea.”

Roz glances over her shoulder and sees Agatha leading Dorcas onto the dance floor, the two of them spinning to the music, a tornado of ginger and black. “I can do that.”

Agatha slides up next to Roz, perspiration making her skin even dewier than the sharp streak of highlight glittering atop her cheekbone. Her lipstick is aubergine, her eyeshadow smoky gray. “If you were going to spend the night being the saddest girl in the club,” she says, “You might as well have stayed behind.” 

Roz bites her tongue and sips the beer Theo made her get, sour in her mouth. “I’m here, I’m queer, I’m having a beer. What more do you want from me?”

Agatha smiles a little. “How about a dance? Or are you too good to dance with a girl for two seconds?”

The bottle clanks against Roz’s teeth, which hurts, because she’s swept up in the sudden vision of Agatha pressed against her — those thigh-high stockings under her short skirt so close at hand, her body already dance-warm, what her lipstick might look like on Roz’s mouth. “I’m good,” she gets out, half-strangled.

Agatha shrugs. “Suit yourself.” 

She takes the beer from Roz and finishes it, her throat bared for a long swallow, before she wanders back into the throng. Dorcas reaches for her with both hands and pulls her close, their legs notching together, hip to hip. Agatha’s hands in her red hair, smoothing and twisting it back; Dorcas’ bare thigh nudging between Agatha’s.

“Oh, you guys are pent-up, huh,” Theo remarks, and when Roz looks at him, his eyebrows are halfway up his forehead to his hairline. He clears his throat. “You should dance if you want, Roz.” A little smile. “You love to dance.”

“Theo,” she says, uncertain, but that only gets her a push into the path of an approaching blonde woman — a little bit older, but probably not much.

“Look at that, it’s fate,” the woman says. “I was just going to ask if you wanted to dance.”

“Um,” Roz says. “Okay. Cool. That’s a thing — that I can do.” 

The woman holds her carefully, one hand light on Roz’s lower back and the other one between her shoulder blades, a whisper of space between their bodies. Roz lets herself curl around her in turn, chin hooked on her shoulder, but she can’t relax. The music happens around her but she doesn’t hear it. She doesn’t know this woman’s name and doesn’t care enough to ask. She wonders if this is what she’s supposed to do, the same thing she did before, playacting with boys, trying to find someone who fits.

Agatha watches her over Dorcas’ shoulder. Those eyes like flint about to spark. She trails black-tipped fingers down Dorcas’ spine, and shifts aside the curtain of her hair to leave an aubergine kiss on her pale, pale throat. 

Roz can’t take it. She pushes away, and she runs. 

Outside, Roz huddles by the brick wall of the club and wraps her arms around herself even though it’s warm outside. Her anger has no direction, pent-up like Theo said but not entirely the way he meant it; she feels hemmed in and tied down, the lid closed to keep her contained. She feels like she’s vibrating out of her skin and she doesn’t know where to go.

The door opens and closes again and there’s Agatha, strands of hair sticking to her face. “It’s not what you think,” she says, and Roz outright laughs. “It’s not. Dorcas and I aren’t like that — well, not anymore, anyway —”

Another mocking laugh breaks free. Roz tightens her hold on herself. “You can do whatever you want. I get it, I’m just a joke to you, this confused girl you can mess with —”

“You’re not a joke to me,” Agatha says sharply. “I’m not messing with you —"

“You’re not?” Roz raises her eyebrows. “Flashing me, flirting with me, the _water_ , I mean, _god.”_ Agatha protests, but Roz doesn’t let up. “It’s like you’re trying to get me to crack, which I’m sure must be so funny for you, but this is really hard for me —”

“You think this isn’t hard for me?” Agatha demands.

“And you’re so above it all —”

“You think I like any of this? You think I like watching what a place like this does to a girl like you?”

Roz stills, heart pounding so hard she feels like she could take flight. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“You’re too good for this,” Agatha spits. Everything out of her mouth sounds so mean, even when it isn’t. “You keep acting like you’re so much less than you are.”

Roz stares at her. Then she has Agatha’s heart-shaped face in her hands, so quick she’s not sure where the middle part went; catches the strange vulnerability of her surprise a second before she’s kissed. 

Roz kisses Agatha. 

Roz kisses Agatha, who is just tall enough that she has to angle up to do it. There’s hair in her face and her hands are steady. Agatha holds her by the wrists, keeps her there, and then enfolds her, crushes Roz against her body. There is nothing inside Roz’s head at all. She’s awake only in these nerve endings — the tips of her fingers on Agatha’s cheeks, her mouth on Agatha’s mouth, the curl of her tongue.

The weirdest part is that it kind of feels like cheering.

Cheer was the only time Roz was allowed to be in her body and in the moment simultaneously. Alight with adrenaline, she could hit her marks without having to run through the choreo in her head first — more than muscle memory, it was fluency. She didn’t have to translate. She doesn’t have to translate this kiss from anything else, either. It isn’t a clinical _that was good for a guy_ or a halfhearted _that’s better than the last one, at least_. It’s totally new and completely familiar.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” Agatha murmurs, but she’s smiling. Roz doesn’t know how she ever thought Agatha was unreadable, because here she is: a little bit of a bitch and a little bit of a tease, longing and afraid and protective. 

Roz knew all that already. She just didn’t let herself know.

“I think it’s exactly what I’m supposed to do,” Roz says, and kisses her again.

In the hearse on the way back to the Center, Agatha holds Roz’s hand, her polished nails a contrast to Roz’s chipped. She tucks her knees up so they’re half in Roz’s lap, and touches the soft inside of Roz’s wrist over and over. Dorcas dozes on Prudence’s shoulder and Sabrina smiles at Roz across the way, soft and sweetly happy. 

When they bundle back into their beds, too high on hormones to fall asleep, Agatha skitters across the space between their beds to kiss Roz goodnight, quick and light. 

Roz feels the ache before she realizes she’s smiling. 

Roz drifts through three days in a dream state. She brushes her teeth and thinks about Agatha; she sits through slideshows with Agatha’s ankle resting solidly against hers; she goes to sleep and dreams of Agatha’s mouth, the pink of her tongue against lips painted purple and black. In her dreams, Roz follows the slide of a water droplet over Agatha’s throat and down, down, down.

Then Ms. Wardwell finds the matchbook.

There’s nothing obviously incriminating about a little cardboard box that says _Dorian’s_ on it, except Ms. Wardwell obviously knows what kind of place it is and wants answers. She wants culprits. She wants to know who the fox in the henhouse is.

They all keep silent, even Luke with his sullen side-glare at Sabrina, who manages to look like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “I thought removing Mr. Scratch would be enough to cleanse the perversity from amongst our ranks, but I see you’re all too prepared to squander your potential,” Ms. Wardwell says. “I want to know who is responsible for this little outing. If you come forward, perhaps you can be spared — I may even let you graduate alongside your peers, so long as you prove your dedication.”

Not a flinch.

“No one? Alright. Ms. Night, with me.” 

She’s speaking to Agatha. “Oh, come on, Mary.” Agatha rolls her eyes. “I was in my room all night. Check how low the batteries are on my shocker.” 

Titters.

“Oh, you think this is funny, do you? I’m not playing games. This was under your bed, Ms. Night. I have no choice but to follow where the evidence leads. That means a call to your guardian and your immediate removal from —"

Agatha stiffens beside Roz. And it’s that more than anything that unlocks Roz’s jaw, makes her pop up in her seat. “I have something to confess! I didn’t sneak out, but I have realized something. I was too scared to say it before, because I didn’t think you’d believe me.” Ms. Wardwell waves an exhausted hand, like, _out with it_. “I’ve been missing Harvey so much since he was sent to solitary and I just — I just knew suddenly, like this jolt, that I really do have feelings for him. I kept seeing this image of the two of us kissing. So now I know.” Roz looks up at Ms. Wardwell earnestly. “The treatment is working.”

Ms. Wardwell is overwhelmed. She drags Roz over and hugs her, holds her clasped to her side while she expresses disappointment with everyone else, celebrating Roz’s success in between threats to call their parents.

But Harvey gets out of solitary, and he’s smart enough to roll with it when Roz plants a kiss on him right away. Her open eyes find Agatha around his shoulder.

Looks like she’s a success story. 

At night when Roz can’t sleep, she turns over to see Agatha awake and waiting for her; they negotiate in traded glances and come to a decision, padding out silently with a quilted pink blanket dragging behind in one hand. They make a cocoon together, shadowed and safe, and Roz feels in a strange way that this is the most alone she’s ever been with anyone. 

Agatha touches Roz’s collarbone with a featherlight finger that wanders along her throat and over her mouth. Roz kisses her fingertip. “What are you like out in the real world,” she wants to know, and, “Why do you live with Mr. Blackwood,” and, “How did you end up here?”

“Worse,” Agatha says, and kisses her, a kiss that eases and deepens. “Luck of the draw.” Her mouth moves down, dislodging the lace of Roz’s petal-pink nightgown. She lets it. “Got caught.”

Roz tangles her hands in Agatha’s hair, smoothes out the strands and shudders when they trail over her stomach. “That’s it?”

She feels Agatha smile through the fabric, a smile pressed against Roz’s bellybutton. “My father died when I was a baby and my mother couldn’t take care of me by herself. I was shuffled around until I landed. And.” She kisses Roz’s knee and lets the silken skirt slip up until it puddles. “I bet Blackwood will never put three teenage girls in the same bedroom ever, ever again.”

Roz wants to smile and she wants to cry, so she draws Agatha back and tries to put both feelings into the press of her lips.

Agatha breathes heavily against her neck with Roz’s fingers inside her, clutching at Roz’s sides and shoulders, hiking her leg higher and higher on Roz’s hip. “That’s right,” Roz tells her, and doesn’t even consider that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. “There you go.”

“I know everyone thinks cheer is totally vapid,” Roz says. “No one understood why I wanted to do it, because I was so studious and serious and all I cared about was fighting the good fight. But.” Her breath catches and she doesn’t look at Agatha, instead studying the quilted pink canopy they’ve made. “It just makes me happy. It’s the only thing in my life that’s not complicated. It’s just — joyful. I didn’t have to be good. I could just _be.”_

The displaced air against her ear feels like a snicker, and she thinks of Agatha telling her to shake her pom-poms, calling her _cheerleader_. 

“Don’t laugh,” Roz says, elbowing her. 

“I’m not laughing, I think you’re cute,” Agatha says. “I’ve never felt like that about anything.” She levers herself over Roz. “Except maybe this.”

Agatha tugs aside Roz’s striped cotton panties. She curls careful hands around Roz’s thighs and puts herself between them, sweeping her hair out of the way in one impatient gesture. The brush of it against Roz’s skin — skin that has been touched by other people but never like this — is almost more intimate than Agatha’s tongue against her. Almost.

After, Agatha brings her mouth up, gleaming, to kiss. 

Roz has always been a little too happy to use Harvey as a shield. She let him be her excuse in the halls of Baxter High and again here at the Center, a little wink-wink nudge-nudge between her and him and Sabrina while they all pretended to be something they weren’t so they could figure out a way to the other side of what they are. 

Roz had the reckless confidence that came with a good con, but it turns out you can’t go down on a girl in queer rehab without somebody seeing. 

Ms. Wardwell wakes her up in the morning with a sharp, “Ms. Walker!” Her red lips purse and sharp eyebrows arch ever higher, disdain and displeasure written all over her face. “It’s always the last one you expect, isn’t it?” She sighs. “And I thought you would be the role model.”

Roz is dragged out of bed and into Ms. Wardwell’s office, catching a glimpse of her friends’ worried faces as she goes, but not Agatha’s. Agatha is turned away, a shadow in a sea of pink and blue. 

Roz doesn’t bother asking what she did; she sits across from Ms. Wardwell with her arms crossed and expression surly, her patience run all the way out. Ms. Wardwell faces her like the devil prepared to make a deal, her fingers folded with their long red nails and glasses flashing in the light spilling in through the windows. 

“Of course, you understand the price you’ll pay for your lack of self-control. You’re not a stupid girl,” Ms. Wardwell murmurs. “I can’t allow you to remain and drag the other students down with you. You will be removed from the program and premises at once. After that, your fate is your own. Your parents have made it clear that you will no longer be welcome in their home, so your wits will be all you have to rely on. Unless.” 

She shifts forward, and continues, “I always thought you were one of my most promising girls. I won’t pretend otherwise. I assumed you’d merely stumbled off the path and could be easily shepherded back. Ms. Night, however — anyone can see the backslide in her future. If you admit that this was all her doing, as I’m sure it was, then I will be happy to get you back on track and into your parents’ loving arms once more.”

“What,” Roz says.

The way Ms. Wardwell’s face moves reminds Roz of a spider sometimes, elegant in a way that also unnerves. “I know she’s the one who snuck out, and you protected her. But think: would she protect you?” Doubtful, she shrugs. “Best to look after yourself.”

“I would never betray Agatha, or anyone,” Roz says coolly. “I was with her because I wanted to be and I don’t regret it. That was one of the best nights in my life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Being with Agatha was like stepping back into herself, the her she had lost somewhere along the way. “I think what you’re doing here is sick and wrong and I couldn’t be happier to go.”

The hint of a curling lip. “As you wish. Best of luck in your future endeavors, Ms. Walker.”

Roz packs her bags and puts on her old clothes, which feels like coming home in a way she hadn’t quite expected. It’s easier to forget yourself in someone else’s skin, but this is Roz’s: thick tights with boots, a denim miniskirt and her camel leather jacket, a scarf tied around her neck. She adjusts her glasses, takes a last look in the bathroom mirror, and bids goodbye to the poison pink room. 

Sabrina catches her arm on the way out, though strictly speaking, they’re not supposed to talk to her. “I’m so proud of you,” she says, quick. “I don’t want you to worry, because I have it all figured out —”

A firm, far away voice: “Ms. Spellman.”

Sabrina rolls her eyes and pulls Roz into a hug; she returns it tightly, and thinks, _proud of you_. Holds it close to her heart for a second. “See you soon.” 

When Roz gets to the steps, she’s surprised to see Agatha sitting there, still in her uniform. She thought she’d change before — well, wherever they end up going. “Hey. You ready?”

Agatha doesn’t have any bags. She glances up at Roz and her face is shockingly bare, not a stitch of makeup on it. She is suddenly very much seventeen. “Ready for what, cheerleader?”

“To go,” Roz says, and hate how uncertain she sounds. “We’re leaving.”

“You are, maybe.” 

The ground under Roz turns to quicksand, and she sinks. “What are you talking about?”

“Made a deal.” Agatha twists the silver ring on her fourth finger, brings it around and around. “What? God, don’t look so betrayed. What was I supposed to do?”

_Be with me_ , Roz thinks, but saying it would make her sound like a little girl. _Stay with me_.

“At least if I stick it out, he’ll pay for college and I’ll have something to fall back on, some kind of life. Not be like my damn mother.” Her hands grip her upper arms hard and her face is turned away, just two black braids down her back. “Come on, Roz. You barely know me.”

Just like that, whatever else Roz is feeling evaporates, and she’s just sad. “I really hate it,” she says. “What a place like this does to a girl like you.”

A hearse is parked down the road slightly, and from behind the wheel Ambrose Spellman honks. 

Sabrina did have it all worked out, as it happens. 

At the Spellman house, Roz finds a bed waiting for her, along with a selection of Hilda’s best pastries and some cold comfort from Zelda. “Your parents are hypocrites operating out of misplaced shame,” she says, smoking. “They’re the ones acting shamefully.”

Roz hasn’t even put her suitcases down yet. Hilda is holding out a hopeful chocolate croissant. “Thanks?”

“Is that the cheer squad captain?”

Roz’s head jerks up to find Nick descending the steps in a pair of black silk pajamas, and the sight of him — an unintentional brother-in-arms — makes her smile. “Is this a mortuary or a hotel?”

“Both?” Nick suggests, smiling back. “Either way, you check in, but you don’t check out.” 

He shows her to her room and lounges on her new bed, while Roz perches in the window seat and looks at the curve of the crescent above. He’s going on about how they have to go out to celebrate her freedom, but when Roz misses one too many conversational cues, he drops the act. “Can’t help noticing you’re not as cheerful as a girl should be after a jailbreak.” 

Roz sighs, shakes her head, and smiles. “It’s dumb. It’s just — I really thought she was going to leave with me. But I should’ve known. I was just her way of making the time go faster.”

“Wait, wait.” Nick sits up. “You mean Agatha?”

Roz nods. Nick treats her to a triumphant whoop. 

“I _knew_ it,” he says. “She had her eye on you the second you got there.”

Roz ignores how that makes her feel. “Doesn’t matter now.” She brings her knees up so she can wrap her arms around them, remembering Agatha’s small, hunched figure on the steps. “I know she’s scared. I just thought… I don’t know. She made me feel brave. I wish I could do the same for her.”

Nick softens, sympathetic. “Give her a minute,” he says. “I mean, you don’t know how long it took before your boyfriend would even let me kiss him.”

She laughs. “Considering the position I found you guys in, it was a swift downward trajectory from there.”

Nick winks, which makes her laugh again. “How is he? My little farm boy.”

He’s with Sabrina, so Roz knows he’s okay. But she knows, too, that he’s been quieter after being stuck by himself, nerves worn down to exhaustion. “I think,” she says, “he could probably use a little rescuing.”

“He has Spellman for that.”

“Not just her.”

Nick ducks his head, smiling too much. “I’m good for a sexual awakening. Most people lose interest after that.”

Roz tilts her head. “Not Harvey,” she says softly, but her thoughts are already straying to Agatha and she wonders — wonders.

Nick does take her to Dorian’s, but Roz spends the entire time scribbling on cocktail napkins while Nick rebuffs advances. “What’s all this about?” he wonders, picking up one of her discarded ideas. _“‘One, two, three, four —’”_

Roz snatches it from his hand before he can humiliate her with her own first draft. “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “Remember what we talked about?” 

“Rescue mission?”

Roz nods decisively. “If I really care about Agatha, then how can I leave her there, subject to all of Ms. Wardwell’s totally insane and harmful rhetoric? Maybe she can’t take a stand yet, but I can. And if she sees me doing it…” She bites her lip. “Maybe she’ll start to feel like she can, too.” 

Nick takes in her pile of napkin-plans and smiles. “I see why you and Spellman are friends.” He sticks out a hand. “I’m in.”

Roz shakes on it, and grins. 

The plan is to storm graduation. 

Ambrose agrees to drive, since the Spellmans were already planning to attend and scoff loudly from the back row; Roz also imagines he isn’t unmotivated by the promise of seeing Prudence again. It’s a bit of a family affair: everyone piled in, dressed head-to-toe in Wardwell’s mandated white, except for Roz. Nick plucks at the hem of her skirt, teasing, “Hot outfit. Not exactly stealthy, though.”

Roz thwacks his hand. “I’m looking to make an impact.”

The ceremony is being held out in the garden, with a small platform and several rows of chairs, filled with more family than there ever was at weekend therapy. The graduates stand grouped at the back, ready to walk up and accept their certificates in their candy pink prom dresses and powder blue tuxes. Congratulations, you’re straight, now go forth and live a lie.

Sabrina’s hair is flipped at the bottom and decorated with a big pink bow; even from a distance, Roz can see the determined glint in her eye. Dorcas fusses with her pink corsage. Prudence smoothes her sleek bobbed wig. Harvey keeps looking around uneasily, and Roz spots his father standing out like a sore thumb in an ill-fitting button-down and gray pants.

Agatha is still, her hair twisted into a low chignon and her face scrubbed clean. She doesn’t look anything like herself and she wears the guise with a constrained kind of restlessness.

“Best keep the engine running, love,” Hilda says, patting Ambrose on the shoulder.

“Come on, Hildy,” Zelda says. “I want to work through at least some of my list of heckles.” 

When Ms. Wardwell steps up to the podium, the kids coalesce into a line. They alternate blue and pink: Billy, then Dorcas, Luke, Prudence, Harvey, Sabrina, Carl, and lastly Agatha. At the end of her rambling introduction, Ms. Wardwell begins calling each graduate by name, but before she can get to Harvey, Nick pulls him off the line. Harvey half-stumbles into his arms, hands on Nick’s shoulders, staring at him like he can’t quite believe it.

“You’re here? You actually came?”

Nick’s brows creases with worry. “You wanted me to?”

“Of course I wanted you to,” and he pulls Nick in, missing the look on Nick’s face, raw in a way Roz didn’t know he ever was. “I missed you.” 

Ms. Wardwell catches sight of them and falters, then tries to segue into the next name on her list. The trouble is, that name is Sabrina’s. She accepts her little plaque and immediately bumps Ms. Wardwell aside, forcibly taking hold of the microphone. 

“It isn’t customary to make a speech —” Ms. Wardwell tries, obviously underestimating who she’s dealing with here. 

“My name is Sabrina Spellman!” she declares. “And I’m bisexual! All of you are living a _farce!_ Can you even see what you’re doing to your children? They want your love and protection so badly they’ll destroy themselves for it and you don’t even care!” 

Roz takes the opportunity to grab her pom-poms and take a deep breath, hands jittering.

“They should be proud of who they are, and so should you!” Sabrina continues. “And if you don’t want them, guess what? I do! Everyone is free to leave here today and come stay with my aunties until you get on your feet.” 

“Ugh, more teenagers,” Zelda mutters.

“Continental breakfasts!” Hilda promises. 

“Ms. Spellman, that is more than enough!” Ms. Wardwell tries to wrest control back, but Sabrina is less than willing, and the parents are getting antsy now, chattering amongst themselves. In the chaos, Roz takes one step forward and then another.

“Agatha!” she calls, and watches Agatha turn, confusion becoming something else, something like astonishment. “Get ready to see me shake it.”

A laugh escapes Agatha, before Roz has even done anything, and that makes her able to smile, to bring her arms up in formation and cheer. “O-K!” she calls, clapping. “Three of wands, queen of swords — you’re the one I adore! Five of coins, six of cups — you’re my girl, I won’t give up!”

Simple and to the point. Not good or great or special, just something that might make Agatha smile; Roz’s way of saying, _I’m putting myself on the line for you. I can do it first, if you can meet me there_. 

Roz’s way of going down fighting.

Agatha rises, and Roz’s heart leaps. Ms. Wardwell is clamoring for order, but it’s like someone pressed the mute button on her. Roz can’t hear anything, and all she sees is Agatha walking towards her, slow and deliberate but gaining ground until everything speeds up all at once. She cups Roz’s face in her hands and kisses her, Roz reacting automatically but forgetting the pom-poms are still in her hands, so their kiss is a laugh shared in a cyclone of iridescent yellow plastic. 

“I can’t believe that worked,” Agatha says, their noses bumping together, foreheads close. “The sex really must have blown my mind.”

“Nope, you just like me,” Roz says, and grins, and knows it’s true. “Deal with it.”

Their friends are cheering, parents shouting, Hilda Spellman wiping away a tear. Harvey kisses Nick and flips his dad off while he does it. Sabrina claps her hands and hops in delight at the madness she had a hand in creating. Mr. Blackwood advances on Ms. Wardwell in a fury, so Roz takes Agatha’s hand and makes a break for it, streaking across the green lawn towards the waiting car. 

Harvey and Nick and Sabrina are right behind them, then Dorcas and Prudence too, the aunties in a more stately shuffle-jog. They pile into the hearse in an exhilarated jumble, Sabrina calling out, “Step on it, Ambrose!” as the car peels off into the setting sun.

Roz holds on, even when the speed could send them sprawling, and Agatha doesn’t let go, either.

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow my CAOS sideblog for updates [@chillingaudrina](http://chillingaudrina.tumblr.com/), or find me on my main blog [@firstaudrina.](https://firstaudrina.tumblr.com/)


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